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The KDE Community has released the first alpha of KDE 4.0 which will gives the popular Linux desktop manager a completely redesigned interface. The initial alpha sees the incorporation of the [Oxygen theme][4], a KDE visual makeover that draws its inspiration from Apple's Mac OS X's Aqua desktop interface, and frankly, looks fantastic.
But cosmetic changes aside, the real development of [KDE 4][5] is the incorporation of the Qt 4.3 GUI framework, which includes improved OpenGL support, "vastly" improved hardware and multimedia integration and the new Dolphin file manager.
The KDE announcement says:
>KDE 4.0 Alpha 1 marks the end of the addition of large features to the KDE base libraries and shifts the focus onto integrating those new technologies into applications and the basic desktop. The next few months will be spent on bringing the desktop into shape after two years of frenzied development leaving very little untouched.
The KDE roadmap calls for a feature freeze by the beginning of June, at which point the initial betas will be available for testing a debugging. The final release of KDE 4.0 is expected in late October 2007.
KDE 4.0 is an alpha release and as such it may be unstable and is recommended for testing purposes only. For those that would like to give it a shot, there's a [Kubuntu version][1] available for testing, as well as [Gentoo][2] and a live CD based on [OpenSUSE][3].
[Screenshot from DesktopLinux.com][7]:
[1]: http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde4-alpha1.php "KDE 4 Alpha 1"
[2]: http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/kde "KDE 4 Alpha 1"
[3]: http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/ "KDE Four Live CD"
[4]: http://www.oxygen-icons.org/ "Oxygen"
[5]: http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-alpha1.php "KDE 4.0-alpha1 Release Announcement"
[6]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/04/exploring_dolph.html "Exploring Dolphin, The KDE 4 File Manager"
[7]: http://www.desktoplinux.com/files/misc/kde4-desktop.jpg "KDE 4 Screenshot"
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